Business Development Lead

Arena

Senior Business Development Lead driving revenue growth for advanced AI evaluations at Arena Intelligence. Managing global model lab relationships and strategic enterprise expansions in a hybrid work environment.

Posted 4/12/2026full-timeBay Area • California • 🇺🇸 United StatesSenior💰 $180,000 - $250,000 per yearWebsite

Tech Stack

Tools & technologies

ServiceNow

About the role

Key responsibilities & impact

Own the Model Lab Relationships: Serve as the primary business lead for top global model labs, managing the relationship from research lead to procurement.
Drive Revenue Expansion: Expand revenue across modalities (text, code, multimodal, vision, auto-eval) by aggressively aligning our eval programs with each lab’s training and research roadmaps.
Strategic Enterprise Expansion: Identify and close select opportunities to bring LMArena’s eval capabilities to high-value enterprise accounts (e.g., Salesforce, IBM, ServiceNow) seeking to evaluate internal or vendor models.
Secure Market Presence: Negotiate co-release and marketing rights for every major lab partnership to ensure LMArena retains mindshare as the industry standard.
Lifecycle Management: Own contract renewals, upsells, and expansions, ensuring forward visibility into multi-quarter revenue commitments.
Pipeline Hygiene: Maintain rigorous revenue forecasts that tie directly to delivery schedules, consumption pacing, and renewal cycles.
Deal Architecture: Design and enforce pricing frameworks that balance predictability (committed contracts) with flexibility (usage-based consumption).
Cross-Functional Alignment: Collaborate with Delivery and Product teams to ensure evaluation capacity, quality, and timing are aligned with customer expectations.
New Product GTM: Ramp up on net new Eval or Data Products and build the strategy to sell them into existing and net new relationships.

Requirements

What you’ll need

10+ Years of Business Development / Sales: You have a proven track record of selling complex technical infrastructure or data products as a top-performing individual contributor.
Proven Closer: You have a history of personally closing seven-figure deals. You are comfortable navigating procurement at large organizations and negotiating complex terms without hand-holding.
AI Fluency: You have ideally worked in AI and understand the stack (Training vs. Inference, RLHF, Benchmarking). You can credible discuss model performance needs with research scientists.
High Agency: You are a self-starter who can operate without a playbook. You effectively manage your own pipeline, forecasting, and deal hygiene.
Operational Rigor: You understand how to align sales promises with delivery reality, working closely with finance and product to ensure deals are profitable and executable.

Benefits

Comp & perks

Comprehensive health and wellness benefits, including medical, dental, vision, and additional support programs.
Competitive compensation and equity aligned to the markets where our team members are based.

ATS Keywords

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Applicant Tracking System Keywords

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Hard Skills & Tools

business developmentsalesrevenue forecastingcontract negotiationpricing frameworkspipeline managementdata productsAI understandingmodel performance evaluationcomplex technical infrastructure

Soft Skills

self-starterhigh agencynegotiationcross-functional collaborationoperational rigorrelationship managementstrategic thinkingproblem-solvingcommunicationadaptability